Why should this not be a surprise? Because natural processes, whether they’re ice coverage at the poles and in continental glaciers and in places like the Great Lakes[2], or the timing of plant and animal cycles, all tend to lock in to the maximum/most beneficial extent possible in a stable environment. Beetles move as far north as they can before they get killed off by cold winters, permafrost exists as far south as it can before it melts, and so on. When we emit many billions of tons of CO2 over a couple of centuries and warm the biosphere, the normally invisible boundaries between hospitable and inhospitable regions for ice, water, plants, and animals, all shift. Suddenly, pine trees in the Rockies and New Jersey are facing a new-to-them infestation; climate change has rewritten the rules in mid-game, with the result being massive “natural” changes. The same holds for Arctic ice, continental glaciers, all aspects of the hydrological cycle, and the migration patterns of animals.

I’ve often (read: endlessly) talked about how climate change undermines the fundamental assumptions of our infrastructure. “Of course it makes sense to put this coal/natural gas/nuclear-fired power plant here — we will always have enough river water to cool it!” And we will, right up to the day when there’s not enough water in the river, or it’s too hot for our purposes, and then we’re suddenly throttling back or shutting down power plants just when we need them most, during heat waves. This has happened numerous times in the EU and the US in the last decade, and as long as we’re tied to our old infrastructure and its increasingly invalid assumptions, it will only happen more. We built a massive portion of our civilization based on one version of reality, and our profligate use of the atmosphere like an open sewer has lead to a wide and deep change in that reality. We have left Earth and are progressing through a series of Eaarths, to borrow the title of Bill McKibben’s book. We’re currently on a path to blow right by 2C of warming over pre-industrial times, with 4C or more by 2100 a real possibility, and even that assumes we can build up that much additional heat in the atmosphere without triggering permafrost and methane feedbacks that will zoom us to even higher levels of warming.

But back to beetles. When I read an article like the one above, I can’t help but wonder why climate communicators don’t make more use of phenology. We have a wealth of information about when lakes freeze and thaw, when cherry blossoms bloom, and countless other natural phenomena. I’ve found that this information is extremely convincing when talking to newcomers who might be under the spell of climate change deniers’ first line of attack, i.e. that It’s Not Really Happening.

[2] See Shrinking ice worries Great Lakes scientists for information about how much ice cover has declined on the Lakes in recent decades. I live near the southern shore of Lake Ontario, and I can attest to the dramatic loss of ice locally just since 2004.